So some of my guild have suggested that ferals are OP at the moment. I checked WoL which is not the best thing this week because of the melee bug, but the rankings do show ferals in the top ten, although not in every fight, and never more than one except for Paragons of the Klaxxi.

I have worked my butt off to get to the dps I do now, which is still laughable compared to some people on this forum and has much room for improvement, but yeah, within my guild I'm quite good right now. It's slightly hurtful that people now imply I'm only doing well because my spec is "too good". Hmph.

What say you, ferals?

-Sibylle

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious." (Brendan Gill)

I know from experience they are relying on Simcraft which may not be accurate, it is certainly less useful than real data. This tier potentially allows Ferals to tunnel more depending on your raid. Even so the logs do not bear out that Feral is the top spec. At best they are reasonably close to the top in normal but still a good ways behind Rogues, Warlocks and Mages. In heroics Feral is average. Also there are 2 distinct groups of Ferals, those with the Heroic TF Rune and those without. If you are in the second group you can't really compare yourself to the first group.

If we are so OP where are all the top ranks? Maybe the people in your guild hasn't put the same efffort into maximizing their dps as you and their scrub minds can only justify them losing dps so badly by blaming it on OP-ness.

I also keep hearing this quiet often from my guild, not only this. but they keep mentioning swipe and thrash as in "Oh yea, he can be up there so easy, it's just one button swipe and thrash, ferals are op"

So yea, I also keep hearing it, and they make it worse when they say its one button swipe easy dps.

Thanks, guys. Kinda comforting to hear I'm not the only one. I'm now in an all-out fight with the guy who brought it up, and that feels just horrible. I love my guild, and I never thought something like this was even possible in this raid

They use examples like this ranking - I just wonder what that's based on? As Tedda pointed out, we don't lead the rankings anywhere. I assume this is the dps on a patchwerk fight, and we have, what, four? of these this tier.

-Sibylle

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious." (Brendan Gill)

The reason that (IMO) we don't see ferals leading the rankings is mostly because there aren't too many playing it. Sure everyone knew that already, but I really need to stress this. In a 25 man hc guild there are about 3-5 warlocks, while there is only ever one feral.Also we aren't too good at inflating logs/scumbagging, if we compare to other classes. Mostly this is because we are melee, but also because we simply don't have the ability to always swap targets and dot them without losing more dps.

Yes at single target ferals are probably pretty OP, but it's all we've got. Once we get to multitarget or cleave, we are balanced once more or other classes dominate.

Try to look at any of the top feral logs and see a breakdown of which targets damage was done to. You will very soon notice that the feral will be absolutely dominating on the main target (difference is quite huge).

OP is not how I would see feral ATM. We are in a very good spot for single target but multi target fights still hurt us.

Ferals are OP if the person playing it is good at the spec.

There is a VERY hard line between a good feral and a great feral.

When I first joined my guild, I was recruited because I put up good numbers and didn't fail to mechanics. Most of my guild had a preset notion on what they thought of feral druids until I joined. After a couple months of me topping the DPS meters on almost every fight, they won't let me tank anymore because by going bear the raid loses too much DPS.

If you look at the top guilds that actually run a feral DPS(Midwinter, Method, Duality, etc) then you will see that we can compete with any class on most fights but that is with top players(Stenhaldi, Fragnance, Maximum, etc) playing the spec. If you look at feral rankings on heroic SoO fights, the difference between a top 10 rank and bottom 150-200 rank is a MASSIVE difference. Top Ferals vs Average Ferals.

You can include yourself in that list, Steakbomb, I've seen your rankings

Agree completely, btw. The ridiculous thing is that I'm firmly on the side of "decent" ferals as opposed to "great". It's probably this forum and the people I get to talk to here that keeps my paws on the ground - I might be good in my fairly casual guild but I'm nowhere NEAR the dps you people are pulling. I have improved a lot and track more stuff than I used to, and of course my gear has gotten better too - but my dps is not what I'd call OP by a long, long road, lol.

-Sibylle

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious." (Brendan Gill)

Gear does such a massive difference it's unbelievable. I very much doubt that you're just a "good" feral yourself.As a feral you have to stop looking at your dps meters too much during the pull and AoE phases and just do what you do best. I was shocked at how big the difference between me and other people was on Garrosh himself during p1 for instance.

If the person your arguing with thinks feral is OP because of the spec, ask him/her to make a feral and see if they can pull off consistent numbers. As many people have already said, the difference between a good feral and great feral is huge.

The unexpected +20% Rip buff made us one of the best single target DPS specs. It's cool seeing some Feral's in the class-wide top 10 for Nourshen, Iron Juggernaut, and Malkorok (if you remove tanks.)

Getting DoC buffed to 30% has made this tier very rewarding, as both DoC and HotW are very competitive -- I enjoy being able to switch freely.

A huge chunk of our damage is snapshotable and the Rune (while not OP by itself) is an awesome trinket and has made gearing a breeze. Remember, a RoR-geared Feral is always in BiS gear (at their item level.)

There's a difference though between "in a good place" and OP. For example, in Dragon Soul the top how-many-100 spots were taken up by fire mages. At the very beginning of Cata, Survival Hunters consistently did a LOT more dps than everyone else. That's OP.

My impression is that as soon as ferals are in a good place, we get bashed for being too powerful. As long as one spec doesn't lead all others by a large margin, it's not OP in my humble opinion.

As for me:- I don't have a Rune (only ever had the lfr version and replaced it with two SoO trinkets)- I don't have the 4piece set bonus- I have no symbiosis that has any impact on my dps in our raid- we are missing the melee attack speed buff from our raid

Not huge, but all these things do have an impact. I like to think that I improved my play, especially because I got better while we were still in ToT, but heck... maybe it *is* just the buffs.

-Sibylle

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious." (Brendan Gill)

I'd say we are extremely strong but not quite overpowered. I do know I make our WARLOCKS jealous with my Rip Ticks.

Our Windwalker monk recently found a bugged interaction with Spirit Link Totem and Touch of Karma (Spirit Link Totem apparently makes it so that the Max HP is shared between the targets so Touch of Karma's Cap is raised from his HP to the HP of him and whoever he is linked to during the duration of Spirit Link) leading to him getting 8-9 Million Damage Globals and all I said was thats like a single Rip for us :X

I am one of the least geared (by ilvl) members of my 25man but I am consistentily in the top 3 for DPS on 4/5 fights (I don't scumbag enough on protectors, paragons, garrosh, or Seigecrafter).

That said while we do put up good numbers our shortcomings are we are still melee dps and we don't have good defensive raid cooldowns. I have literally only been asked for my HotW tranq once this tier and it is on Spoils Hc. Stampeding Roar is really strong though and instant cast rebirths are also strong especially on things like Thok where lots of classes can't cast for extended periods of time.

Edit: Another thing to note is we scale on stats a lot better than many specs right now. I know personally basically every normal mode piece I get changed to a BIS piece is about a 6K DPS upgrade minimum. Our hunters are talking about 2-3K dps upgrades from things that arent their weapons /trinkets. This makes me sad for them.

First off, arguing about anything that comes from noxxic is just lol (not to be disrespectful, but the unreliability of that site and it's contents have been in question for several expansions now).

Are we OP?If the person behind the screen controlling it is exceptional, we can seem pretty powerful. That's not to say other classes don't have this also (rogues/locks/mages).

Our single target is pretty nasty. Take Sha of Pride for example. The only reason our warrior(s) can catch/keep up on this fight is when he can lolstorm the adds. If you look at Sha damage though, I'm usually 30m ahead (of everyone else). Same goes for Malkorok. I usually just leave the adds alone so rogues can blade flurry and warriors can do whatever they do.

Karlzone wrote:Never thought about it like that before. I've always been annoyed by RoR gearing.

Even if I could get a heroic Rune right now I couldn't use it. While I got lucky while I was Bear and got a lot of BIS drops, now that I am Feral is impossible to get my Mastery above my crit with my current gear.

Karlzone wrote:Never thought about it like that before. I've always been annoyed by RoR gearing.

Even if I could get a heroic Rune right now I couldn't use it. While I got lucky while I was Bear and got a lot of BIS drops, now that I am Feral is impossible to get my Mastery above my crit with my current gear.

then use mastery gems?

Like I had issues for a bit with a lack of hast on my gear I can't imagine you are in a 4K+ deficit of mastery to Crit that reforging and gemming couldnt fix.

Sibylle wrote:Off-topic (but it's my own thread, so there!): Paloro, is that you on top of the ranks for 25N Blackfuse? And if so, HOW in the name of all that's pawed and furry, do you do 489k dps??

If memory serves me right, his guild lets him tunnel the boss / aoe bombs? It'll be different in each guild you look at, each feral parse, because guilds like mine (Angry), we use ferals on the belts instead

Sinilye wrote:If memory serves me right, his guild lets him tunnel the boss / aoe bombs? It'll be different in each guild you look at, each feral parse, because guilds like mine (Angry), we use ferals on the belts instead

This.

Every time we do this fight we take advantage of feral DPS on the belt and I solo every other belt without issue. Although I would assume that on heroic I will need help(10man).

Same idea on other fights too. It's really hard to judge how well you will do by looking at others logs as every guild is different. For example, on Garrosh 10 my guild runs with a Brewmaster tank(Rushing Jade Wind is OP for sure) so I purely tunnel boss and use Typhoon to push any remaining adds into the Iron Star. I very rarely rank on that fight because of this. And on Nuroshen I am the first dps down and tunnel boss the rest of the fight while possibly having a trash on an add or 2.

This tier there really isn't any Patchwerk type fights except maybe Malkorok(even though there are a couple adds on heroic).

If you are looking at other ferals on WoL, I highly suggest looking closer at the log and see how their damage is allocated(IE: 100% on boss or 70% on boss and 30% on adds).

A good instance to look at rankings would be a fight like Iron Jugg on 10 heroic. Some guilds just avoid the mechanics and continue to DPS the boss through Siege mode and some guilds like mine run away from boss to avoid the bombs every where and have a huge amount of downtime. Or a fight like Tortos last tier where ALL of the top parses in 10 man are of ferals keeping thrash/swipe up on the bats the whole fight.

Hardest spec to play right in a raid environment imo so we DESERVE to be top... and we still aint on some fights. I made a mage friend of mine roll a feral and he has a new desire to wanna play perfectly lol And yeh our amazing logs class wide are all just double trinket proc runes being extended during execute phase or 2 set aoe spam, both being rng. It's a shame there aint that many great ferals out there to put aside this ''there just aint many raiding ferals in 25 man hc'' nonsense.

What's your item level (or just link the armory)? At around ilvl 545 I was doing perhaps 300k on a good pull and now at 566 it's increased to 385k (with DoC or/and a good execute I surely can get to 400k). Gear scaling is just too insane.